A request by outgoing Canadian High Commis-sioner Lilian Chatterjee to pay a courtesy call on Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon has been refused.
“I regret to advise that the date, 9th December… for the farewell courtesy call…has become inconvenient due to other urgent political commitment on that day,” Harmon wrote to Chatterjee in correspondence dated December 7.
He went on to wish the diplomat well in her new posting to Barbados before detailing “matters of concern” which arose during her three-year tenure.
According to Harmon “there was concern about the role the Canadian High Commission played in facilitating the departure of Charrandass Persaud immediately after he voted against the APNU+AFC Coalition” in the Decem-ber 2018 no-confidence motion.
Persaud, a Canadian citizen, had with help from the High Commission fled to Toronto, Canada, via Barbados. He has since claimed that he feared for his life and had received death threats.
In an interview with Stabroek News last week Chatterjee said that she was not in the country at the time and the matter had been resolved between the two states.
“I wasn’t in the country. Actually (former) Presi-dent (David) Granger accepted that I was not involved. And he was very gracious with me. Presi-dent Granger has always been gracious with me. The fact that the government [fell in the no-confidence motion saw] heightened tension between Canada and Guyana. But then things calmed down. President Granger came to our Canada Day event in July, we resumed our collaboration with government and it was if everything was normal,” she said, adding that the matter was resurrected during the vote count in an attempt to discredit her.
Harmon in his letter also made mention of the count following the March 2 elections; he claimed that there were “breaches of Diplomatic Protocol by the High Commissioner during the electoral counting of votes.”
While he was not specific about what constituted these breaches Chatterjee had famously dismissed one of the several legal proceedings as frivolous and been accused of barging into a meeting of the Guyana Elections Com-mission on March 5.
The High Commissioner has denied this accusation.
“Someone said I had kicked down her door. I wasn’t even in the building at that point. I don’t know what was going on back in Ashmin’s [that night]. It was really quite shocking for people to make up lies about what I had done. And then months later, one of the APNU GECOM commissioners claimed that I had ‘barged in’ to the meeting, which I had not done…They decided to come up with a false narrative about my involvement and nobody else, just me. I was the target. I find it interesting that I was going to be the target of their false narrative,” she lamented during her exit interview with this newspaper.
